PPN removed, drastic Isidic security breach at 504, TUNNELS in final completion
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Excerpt from venturebeat.com
By Vivek Wadhwa
The good news is that governments no longer have a monopoly on space exploration. In two or three decades, we will have entrepreneurs taking us on private spaceflights to the moon. That is what has become possible.
What has changed since the days of the Apollo moon landings is that the cost of building technologies has dropped exponentially. What cost billions of dollars then costs millions now, and sometimes even less. Our smartphones have computers that are more powerful than the Cray supercomputers of yesteryear — which had strict export controls and cost tens of millions of dollars. We carry high-definition cameras in our pockets that are more powerful than those on NASA spacecraft. The cameras in the Mars Curiosity Rover, for example, have a resolution of 2 megapixels with 8GB of flash memory, the same as our clunky first-generation iPhones. The Apollo Guidance Computer, which took humans to the moon in 1966, had a 2.048 MHz processor — slower than those you find in calculators and musical greeting cards.
The same technologies as are available in the United States and Europe are available worldwide. Innovation has globalized.
I met Team Indus while I was in Mumbai to speak at INK last November. When they told me they were competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. I didn’t take them seriously because I had seen their counterpart in Silicon Valley, Moon Express, which has the support of tech moguls such as Naveen Jain. How could a scrawny little startup in Bangalore take on Naveen Jain, former NASA engineer Bob Richards, and NASA itself, I thought. The Moon Express team is a force of nature, has the advantage of being on the NASA Ames Research campus, and has been given R&D worth billions of dollars by NASA.
Team Indus was also up against Astrobotic, which is a spinoff from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, and Israel-based SpaceIL, which has the backing of the country’s top research institutes.
The company’s win blew my mind. Even though the subject of my INK talk was how Indian entrepreneurs could help change the world, I didn’t think it was already happening.
(See my Jan. 1 story on the Indian tech scene and watch this talk to learn more: Why India shouldn’t be succeeding but is.)
The Bangalore-based startup was founded by former I.T. executive Rahul Narayan and four of his friends: an Air Force pilot, a marketing executive, an investment banker, and an aerospace engineer. None of the team had experience in building spacecraft or robots, yet they were able to build technology that could navigate to the moon.
Narayan says he expects completion of his space mission to cost around $30 million. Moon Express chief executive Bob Richards estimates $50 million. These numbers are higher than the $20 million prize that they hope to win. But both see far greater opportunities: They hope to be pioneers in what could be a trillion-dollar industry. Richards is looking to mine the moon for minerals and bring them back to Earth. Each payload could be worth billions.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE has 26 teams competing from around the world. Collectively, they will spend in the hundreds of millions of dollars on their efforts. For them, it is not all about winning the contest; many of the losers will still commercialize their space technologies or put their knowledge to use in other fields. This is the power of such competitions. They lead entrants to spend multiples of the offered purse on innovative solutions. And they motivate people outside the industry, such as Narayan, to enter it with out-of-the-box thinking.
Innovation prizes are not new. In fact, a number of celebrated historical feats were made possible, in part, by the desire to win these prizes. In the 1920s, New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the first person to fly non-stop between New York and Paris. Several unsuccessful attempts were made before an American airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won the competition in 1927 with his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis.
Lindbergh’s achievement made him a national hero and a global celebrity. And it sparked the interest and investment that led to the modern aviation industry.
That is what I expect will come of the Lunar XPRIZE. And that is why I am looking forward to booking my round-trip ticket to the moon one summer in the 2030s.
Excerpt from foxnews.com
Despite cost overruns, lawsuits, public opposition and a projected completion date 13 years behind schedule, California Gov. Jerry Brown broke ground Tuesday on what is to become the most expensive public works project in U.S. history: the California bullet train.
Over the next 1,000 days, California is estimated to spend roughly $4 million a day on the project.
The high-speed train, set to be finished in 2033, originally was supposed to deliver passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes. That was the promise when voters narrowly approved $10 billion in bonds for the project in 2008. Since then, however, the estimated trip time has grown considerably, and the train has encountered persistent problems -- as experts uncovered misrepresentations in the ballot proposition, and opponents sued to stop the project on environmental and fiscal grounds.
"We're talking about real money here," said Kris Vosburgh, executive director of taxpayer watchdog group Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. "This is money that's not available for health care or education, for public safety, or put back in taxpayers' pockets so they have something to spend. This is money being drawn out of the system for a program that is going to serve very few people."
Much about the project has changed since it was sold to the public.
Voters were told the project would cost just $33 billion. Once experts crunched the numbers, however, the price tag soared to $98 billion. It was supposed to whoosh riders from Southern California to the Bay Area in less than three hours, but now it’s more than four hours due to changing track configurations and route adjustments. The train was supposed to get people off the freeway and reduce carbon emissions, but a panel of experts now says any carbon savings will be nominal. (A drive by car takes just over 6 hours. Ed.)
Further, ridership projections have been cut by two-thirds from a projected 90 million to 30 million a year. Fewer riders means higher prices. According to a panel of transportation experts hired by the Reason Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, tickets will exceed $80 -- not $50 -- and the system will require annual subsidies of more than $300 million annually.
"The public has turned sour on this plan but the governor, to paraphrase Admiral Farragut, has taken a position of 'damn the people, full speed ahead'," Vosburgh said.
Undaunted by critics, Brown broke ground in Fresno on Tuesday on the first 29-mile segment of the train's system. Under Brown's direction, the California High Speed Rail Authority has gone to court to seek an exemption from an environmental quality law the state imposes on other projects but not this one. Brown also convinced the state Legislature to dedicate an annual revenue stream from the state's carbon tax, to help pay for the bullet train.
"It's a long project, a bold project and one that will transform the Central Valley," Brown said Monday as he began his fourth and final term as governor.
Once construction begins, supporters say it will be harder to stop the project. Several lawsuits linger, but a bigger question concerns the money: Where will it come from? If every penny committed to the project is added up, the project is still more than $30 billion short. Republicans in Congress are vowing not to commit a dollar more than President Obama approved in 2012.
"For years now, Governor Brown and the high-speed rail authority have turned the idea of high-speed rail into a public albatross far beyond what Californians envisioned or voted for," House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a statement released Tuesday. "Sadly, today's groundbreaking is a political maneuver. Supporters of the railroad in Sacramento can't admit their project is deeply flawed, and they won't give up on it despite the cost. But these political tricks are exactly what the American people are tired of and what the new Republican Congress is committed to ending."
Supporters don't see waste. They argue the project will reduce freeway gridlock, offer competition to air travel and provide an alternative to trucking freight.
Environmentalists also have opposed the project, suing and claiming the construction project would harm 11 endangered species and worsen air quality in the already dirty Central Valley. They lost when a federal judge ruled the project did not have to adhere to the state Environmental Quality Act, unlike other projects. Additional legal challenges remain, but supporters believe once the train leaves the station and ground is broken, there's no going back.
"The legacy of the Brown family is that they have been big thinkers, but also big builders," said Democratic state Assemblyman Henry Perea. "I think this is an opportunity for the legislature to step up, support Governor Brown. "
The Red Pyramid The Red Pyramid, also called the North Pyramid, is the largest of the three major pyramids located at the Dahshur necropolis. Named for the rusty reddish hue of its granite stones, it is also the third largest Egyptian pyramid, af...
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2 May 2012
Dezarae: A few people have come to me for advice recently and have mentioned that they feel they have cleared so much debris from their bodies, but they still have this one nagging issue that they just cannot seem to sh...
Simion, through Jill Amariah Mara The Transformation Series April 2012 We are Simion, The Evolutionary Collective. Welcome to the month of Aries, April 2012, which can prove to be one of your most life changing months personally and globally...
30 March, 2012 Karyl Jackson April is universally a NINE* month (in numerology terms) bringing many situations and circumstances into completion and closure. Getting all of the old outdated events, circumstances and situations and moving them out o...
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Tuesday, March 27, 2012
We would like to say we are humbled by the efforts of our Lightworkers in the field who are working very diligently towards our shared goals. We would like to thank each and every one of you for your e...
We would like to say we are humbled by the efforts of our Lightworkers in the field who are working very diligently towards our shared goals. We would like to thank each and every one of you for your efforts in support of our cause. Your wo...
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a message from Metatron channeled by Tyberonn Friday, 28 October, 2011 (posted 22 November, 2011)
Greetings Masters !
We encircle each and every one of you with a nurturing energy and with the field of self empowerment, for ...
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Cosmic Awareness Newsletter 2012-01
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7 March 2012
Channeler: Will Berlinghof
Well...Anasazi1 just made me realize that there was no Cosmic Awareness message posted here recently,so here's the most recent one avaiable right one,as the CAC newsletter is for mem...
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